This No-Till Farmer Shares Inspiration Regenerative Farm in Japan

This No-Till Farmer Shares Inspiration Regenerative Farm in Japan

I’m listening a lot of the podcast uh from the states right now on agriculture and farming. A lot of them talk about even what they allow in organic certification at this point like all the way up to hydroponics and growing indoors and under lights. That’s even being considered organic too. So people are kind of shying away from organic in some cases. Maybe looking at like uh regenerative agriculture is is kind of a new buzz word or natural natural farm in Japan. Natural farming exists. Um she’s in Noo-Ho and this is pretty uh this comes from like Fukuoka Masanobu, one of the first natural farmers um like at least documented natural farmers where he talked about what he faced and and the issues he had with farming naturally and um it was it was a one of the books that inspired me actually to come to Japan and uh so he talks a lot about that. Yeah, I think uh Japanese customers though also aren’t very aware and uh we did a research a small research project on uh farmers markets and mush and organic was on there natural and pesticidefree and there’s several of them in Japan like several labels um but local seemed to be one of the most important I mean this was amongst only two or 30 hundred people that we interviewed but local was important so maybe you know, combining that and then bringing people out to your farm and showing them what you’re doing, you know, um that starts to maybe matter a little bit. Just having that mix of variety, you you end up having different types of uh good pest and bad pest kind of all living together. It’s quite confusing for uh animals and pests. So, you know, they, you know, if you have something of the same thing of everything, you know, it’s really easy for that one pest to come in and attack. And this this land too, it’s been one year of, one full year since we started. And the guy who was farming here wasn’t using compost. He was just using chemical fertilizer. So, we wasn’t feeding the soil. It’s definitely increased. And that’s I think has a lot to do with just adding the deep compost mulch and uh figuring out maybe next what we can do to rest the soil or what we use cover crops to improve soil which you don’t really gain much from cover cropping. You know you don’t get there’s no really economic value from doing it other than returning the the material back to the soil. I mean we grow and we put in a lot of cover crops like like crimson clover is It’s like canola flowers or nanohana I think in Japanese is the flower. So we’re planting these kinds of things and attract to attract bees. Hopefully we’ll have some hives here too at some point.

Organic, no-till, regenerative farmer Thomas Kloepfer of Pitchfork farms explains how his essential workers are the farm animals who help keep the weeds down and fertilize the soil for growing vegetables and fruit.

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Pitchfork Farms is on Mukaishima island opposite ONOMICHI in Hiroshima prefecture, Japan